Civil rights work in Mississippi (1964-65) convinced me that strategic nonviolence (the way of the peaceful warrior) is preferable to violence (the way of the warrior) in most situations. It should be obvious that both nonviolence and fighting are preferable to the way of the coward, i.e., meek submission to evil. I largely subscribe to the teachings of Jesus, Gandhi, Walter Wink, and Martin Luther King on nonviolence and believe it is central to dealing with the entire range of crises confronting humankind today (e.g., global warming, wars, starvation, pollution, peak oil, etc, etc.). Gene Sharp and his colleagues have documented dozens of historical examples of nonviolent campaigns and have formulated the theory of how to wage nonviolent campaigns. His work has been a major influence on me. It seems to me that what the world needs is images of how nonviolence might work in large scale conflicts in which one side is brutal and is  willing to kill large numbers of people. My writing, both fiction and non-fiction, focuses on these large scale, brutally violent situations and explores the dynamics of one side using nonviolence.  For instance, I am just finishing a novel, Denmark Rising, set in 1940  Denmark. The novel tells the story of the Danes using strategic nonviolence to resist the occupation by the Nazis. This was a fascinating exercise because everyone believes you could not successfully use nonviolence against the Nazis. 

Past president of the American Society for Cybernetics